Since the Liberal Democrats are no longer part of the government I think Cameron will try to gut the welfare state much more than he did in the last 5 years. Any thoughts?
We know that the Liberals tried to claim that they held back the most extreme examples of Tory austerity, however saying it as part of your election campaign does not necessarily make it true, and anyway there is a matter of interpretation - what seems to be tough unfair cost cutting to one may also be dressed up as a form of social justice to those who are taxed to pay for it.
We know that Cameron has pledged not to increase certain taxes that would be the more obvious ways to raise revenue, and yet at the same time has also pledged to balance income/outgoings.
Add to this that some words have been used that seem to mean that some areas of expenditure are largely protected - NHS and Education.
This is taken to mean that all other areas of expenditure will face far greater cuts.
I think we can expect to find that non-work benefits will be cut, but how much is yet to be seen by anyone outside the senior cabinet members and the senior civil servants who have been charged with developing the information required to begin such a program.
At some point I think that the costs of aging populations will have to be addressed, from pensions through to healthcare, state age retirement has been increased to 68, it would not surprise me to see this increase. I would also not be surprised to find some ways to means test pensioner benefits - it will not be done overtly because these people are the core of the Tory vote, some it will come in some other way.
It would not be surprising to see child benefit limited to the first two children, and reduce for subsequent living children - maybe down to nothing. After all, we don’t have enough housing for our current population and large families are a matter of choice, not of necessity. I’m sure that would be the justification for it.
You can definitely expect that benefits for non-UK residents, and for non-UK citizens will decline or stop completely. This will not just be for cost saving, it will play very well to a British public who have a belief that their taxes are used to pay benefits to EU migrants - some of the tv programs about benefits being paid in Eastern European migrants nations are quite emotive. You can expect that when we have a EU referendum, it will be a subject of debate, and will also be very likely to form part of the package that UK will seek to negotiate with the EU.
A lot of the cuts have not yet realised their potential savings because the costs of reductions - such as redundancies and pensions and staff regrading - were front end loaded. Those savings will take time to work their way through. I can think of some organisations that will start to save money of the orders of several billions over the next three to four years.
Its also true that those public sector organisations are also struggling to provide the service expected of them because of those cuts.
I think that Cameron does believe that increased employment will lead to an increased tax take and a reduction in benefit payouts. This is a huge battleground because the very definition of employment is up for grabs, does an uncertain-income zero hours contract actually count as a job?
As for the ‘apprenticeships’ I think we can expect that if you are at a qualifying age to take up one of these ‘apprenticeships’ and you fail to do it, you will not be allowed to claim any benefits - this is a long and proud tradition of the Tories- to force young people to work for extremely low wages under the transparently false premise that they are actually doing some learning - Tory history of youth employment is littered with exploitative ‘training’ packages.
Maybe young folk do need some hardship to ensure they concentrate on what really matters, instead of expecting state and parental handouts - I know that I was never even given anything by anyone. Sometimes a bit of discomfort and stress is what we need to provide motivation.
It does aggrieve me that drug addicts, and alcoholics can claim increased state benefits for their own self imposed problems, and by doing so they make it my problem in that myself and working folk like me have to pay for it…and yes it really does happen…more than you might think. If you know my posting history then you’ll know that I work in a prison and see this every single working day with hundred, nay thousands of them.
I don’t think that is sufficient justification to make life hard for those who are at the bottom of society through no fault of their own, or suffering because of a lack of employment in their area - I can think of many towns and villages that have not recovered from major industry shutdowns, and those places will probably not recover in any meaningful way for this or the next generation. Coincidentally those major industry shutdowns took place as a direct result of previous Tory administrations. I don’t think such places will fare any better under this one.
We can certainly hope, but doubt he’ll have the moral fortitude to carry through substantial changes. Cameron is not really a man that strikes you as terrible revolutionary og strong willed. Thatcher could have pushed it through. Cameron?
One always hears the highest hopes from supporters and the darkest fears from opponents right after an election. Neither usually materialize, in my experience.
Can you expand on this a bit? How do non-citizen-non-residents living outside the UK collect UK benefits?
No. That’s really all that needs to be said.
It sounds like he is talking about two distinct groups:
UK citizens living outside the UK and
Non-citizens living inside the UK
I was referring more particularly to “benefits being paid in Eastern European migrants nations”.
What happens is our wonderful building industry employs East European labour from poorer EU countries. Employer advise their workers to claim in-work tax benefits to support their children back in their home country. This allows employers to pay the bare minimum for labour, minimum wage knowing that this will be subsidised by the government.
The government will probably put a stop to this, though social security benefits are supposed to be available on a reciprocal basis between EU countries in order to encourage the free mobility of Labour.
The outrage at this should be tempered by the knowledge that someone from the UK is also entitled to social benefits when working elsewhere in the EU. Some of those countries have far more generous benefits than the UK.
However, this is just a bit of headline grabbing tinkering around the edges of the Social Security budget.
The big government bills in the UK are State Pensions, the NHS and Social Security. They have already put huge pressure on the unemployed, finding many excuses to cut these benefits it people do not seem to be trying hard enough to find a job.
Governments tend to be very shy of doing anything that would affect the NHS since it revered in the UK akin to state religion. As for old age state pensions. These are a huge cost, but they all vote, so again they have to tread carefully.
I suspect they will roll out a reformed social security system - Universal Credit - with a view to making many efficiency savings. They could also probably save a lot by merging Health and Social care. Both of these things need to be done sooner or later.
‘Efficiency’ is a good political word.
Cameron and the Conservatives have an ambitious target to reduce the deficit. £12Billion off Welfare and £13Billion savings from government departments.
I guess they could do that by cancelling the HS2 high speed train line or something dramatic like that.
They have held off a lot of the pain for a long time to get through the election.
I am expecting the cuts to get quite rabid. They have the mandate now. Hold onto your hats.:eek:
What annoys me about this ‘benefit culture’ is that it’s a complete falsehood. As portrayed by the right wing media, you’d be given the impression that anyone on welfare is a scumbag just out to milk the system, and that a substantial amount of money is thrown to job seekers for them to live on, which is not the case. The large proportion of the Welfare bill is on Pensions, that’s right, the very thing all those workers paid into all their lives.
I agree, the vilification of the unemployed is just plain wrong in my opinion.
Dole money is called ‘Job Seekers Allowance’ (JSA), as if the government were some careful patriarch from the Victorian age keen to separate the ‘deserving poor’ from workshy scoundrels. They are subject to financial sanctions that punish them if they are not seen to sufficiently disciplined in their job seeking activities. They are an easy target. Good, honest, hardworking families are encouraged to think of themselves a cut above these spongers. There is not much in-betweern those extremes. The UK does not have graduated employment insurance system. You are either in work, or a social pariah. Sadly for the government, unemployment is at a historic low, to they will have to turn their sights onto some other aspect of public expenditure.
Pensions arrangements have to change, we have and aging, more long-lived population that increases the strain on welfare and health services.
Yes, indeed, those people have contributed all their working lives to pay for this. But…the UK and the rest of the developed economies are on the same trajectory - not enough young tax payers to generate to money needed to pay for the pensions. Try telling any pensioner that one of the obvious answers to this problem is…more immigration. Another answer is to increase the pensionable age.
Not exactly vote winners.
During elections, the politicians play to electorates prejudices and offer thinly disguised bribes. What they don’t want to say is how much pain people are going to have suffer and who is going to bear the brunt of it.
The UK economy is not in a good state, the bills are piling up and we have a huge deficit. We have been living in something of a phoney war, I think pretty soon the government is going to have to make some big painful public service cuts. You can see that has happened in other countries. It is not going to be pretty, they are running out of easy targets
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I don’t know about gutted, but significantly reduced seems extremely likely.
Cameron has vowed to reduce the amount spent on the welfare state. He has specifically exempted pensions and unemployment benefit. That leaves only disabled people, their carers, and children. They really don’t get a lot of money as it is - carers’ allowance, for example, is only £62pw (and if you earn over £102pw, you lose it all). £62pw for spending at least 35 hours caring for someone with a disability really is not a lot of money, but it’s one of the things in the firing line.
DLA is also in the firing line - the main suggestion is taxing it and freezing it - but DLA was introduced so that people could pay for their own extra care needs instead of the govt paying for each thing individually, with all the extra admin. It’s usually used to help pay for an adapted car, to pay for specialist carers to come in to your home, to pay for respite care, etc. It’s quite difficult to get, too.
FTR, David Cameron claimed DLA for his disabled son.
Child benefit is another one. It’s currently about £20 for the first child and £15 for each subsequent child, per week. There’s already been a cap at £60,000 for one parent, which is daft because a single parent earning £60k will not be eligible whereas two parents earning £118k between them won’t. I suspect that this will be the first, with the suggestion of removing it after a certain number of children under the age of 18 (I’ve heard 2, 3 and 4 touted; don’t know which one is favoured). Average family sizes in the UK make me think this is going to cost more in admin than it’ll save in payouts.
I didn’t know you were British. You don’t live in the UK. Why do you want the welfare state to be gutted? Not just reduced, but gutted.